Notecard Collection: Five

This is what I was talking about last week, Mimi, when I couldn’t let Professor Harris get away with that dismissive look in Religions of the World when you said that the whole Adam-and-Eve story was a cheap and sexist rip-off of an earlier Sumerian story, replete with all the color of paganism. His look said, “bitch,” before he could hide it behind professorial condescension and then that rhythmless over-sixties bald man’s imitation of you-go-girl. Very hip these days in the Ivies. I know you don’t like that I called him a wonky-eyed Freudian who’ll walk around for hours with his pants at his ankles if there’s no one around to pull them up after he shits, but you didn’t have to kick at me when I brought up that his ex-wife had been reading Cixous, H.D. and May Swenson long before she slipped his ring on and disappeared into that patriarchal heart of darkness. After all, I was right, and I convinced myself of it today at Sparky’s café when some wing-tipped linebacker entered with credit-card confidence and that same breakneck blindness that in twenty years will make him the irreducible asshole of the downtown office. He stormed a neighboring table to ask what the bathroom code from their receipt was, but I wished so much he’d turned to ours, to me, that I turned when he erupted with entitlement and answered in look-this-way Russian, “ч Á‰‡ÒÚ‚ÛÂÚ ‚ÂÎËÍËÈ ëÓ‚ÂÚÒÍËÈ ëÓ˛Á!” When he said, “What?” I could see that same high-speed look that would never have time for things like street signs, stoplights, pedestrians, and women drivers. “I’ve got the code here, and I’ll give it to you,” I said, and slapped him on the butt, “if you buy something from the table. How about a nice quarter of buttered bagel?” His “excuse me?” was getting us closer to the point, Mimi, working backwards along the trajectory the Prof’s face had taken. First, you-go-girl in that shade of “you-like-what-you-see-don’t you?” upon the butt slapping; second, a tight-lipped condescension when he found himself on the customer’s side of an antagonistic pretend retail counter; and third, not only that look but also its verbalization, “Don’t be a bitch,” just after my eye-flutter. I turned to the girls simultaneously, because I knew what was coming from that LOOK, and said, “This, ladies, is what I was just getting at: the definition of ‘bitch’ in a patriarchal construct is none other than an epithet for a woman who won’t comply with a man’s desires, no matter how unjustifiable. This wonky-eyed Freudian (forgive me, it’s a knee-jerk, irresponsible epithet, paired uncontrollably with the one currently in question) thinks I’m being unjustifiably rude--though if I had bigger breasts or if I could hide contempt better he might find it flirtatious--and thereby justifies his own rudeness. But he has no idea that I work here, that I clean the bathrooms after closing, and that my giving him today’s restroom code without demanding he follow the rules and purchase something like everybody else, is equivalent to my agreeing to clean up after his ass pro bono. I submit that anyone who offers such service in ignorance is an angel but, when offered with awareness, is none other than this suit’s bitch.”

Notecard Collection: Four

“Ruthie, this must be a first draft that you’ve sent me, and I have to say it just won’t do. It doesn’t communicate any real feeling or emotion. It’s just too bland and straightforward. Some subtlety and imagery will really spruce it up. Like the line where you write, “Dear Family and Friends”—what do you expect to accomplish with something so formal and conventional? It sounds like you’re about to announce that you’ve replaced purple with blue as your favorite color. (True, were you to announce just that, indeed, Dear Family and Friends might be appropriate. But what if you had simply given purple up and made no formal replacement? Just think about that! Or if you chose a favorite color category, like muted earthy spring shades, instead of just a favorite color? I’ll leave the salutation for that scenario open to the gallery.) Given the circumstances that you try to communicate, don’t you think something more personal is appropriate? This salutation is store-bought and gift-wrapped like three-quarters of the salutations out there this time of year. You need something homemade. Try “Dear Gods and Godesses” or “To the Poets and the Readers in the house” or “To the roof beams, all your eyes!” Think how your parents will read the content of the letter that salutes them in this way—“Dear Bloodgivers and Bloodsuckers!” Think of the haste and twist with which their eyes will reflect the letter’s succeeding words. But not these words, Ruthie, here in the first sentence: “I’ve fought and tried, but all I know is guilt and hate, and caution.” I know what you’re saying, I mean I do, because we’ve talked about it before, and I think I’ve been where you are now, at least as far as I dared go in my imagination, and some poetry. But they won’t know. How can they, when the sentence says just what it means without reflecting any of your fading skin color or the droop and surrender of your cheeks? And it doesn’t show where the blood will introduce a new red into the rug nor does it express anything about the tilt of your body on the bathroom linoleum or the purple and blue bulge just above your left eye where your head hit the corner of the sink when you finally collapsed. Try saying things in color, Ruthie, for the sake of the English language and all those who have to read your note before they find your body. Here’s an example that you may have as your own if you want it. “Just before I wrote this note, I opened a can of tuna fish, but not to eat. I just looked at it for two minutes or so before I spooned it into the disposal and threw the can away. The smell is all I wanted, Mom, and the lid, Dad, and, Rob, its sharp edges. I would have taken the garbage out first, Mom, because I did notice it was full, Dad, but, Rob, it was just too heavy. I still went outside, though, as if I had the sack of garbage in my hands, so I had to back the screen door open. No matter what I do that door always scrapes the top of the door jam all the way to ninety degrees. I don’t know how you’ve managed that sound all these years, Mom, or why, Dad, you haven’t yet fixed it, or, Rob, what you did with the five dollars I gave you for your birthday.”

Notecard Collection: Three

“Dear Johnson, do you mind that I call you by your last name? I have nothing against your first. It’s just that your face isn’t made for a first name. You’ve seen it in the mirror, I know. Those eyes are so closely set and that nose so cramped for space that it seems to me it will fall off if you ever cross your eyes. Don’t try it! I like you much too much to see you go through the rest of your life without your nose. And you need your nose now, in these days, what with a wrapper or a box over everything. How wonderful to crash into the odor of freedom every time you liberate a twinkie! But back to your last name. Would you mind terribly if I tried to forget your first name altogether? I don’t know if it’s possible since we’ve known each other now for nearly half a year, but I’ve always wanted to give my memory that ultimate test—a purposeful forgetting, a planned erasure—and I’d like to know a person who only has one name, even if officially you have two. Johnson Johnson Johnson. Repetition is the mother of memory, Johnson. Oksana says that’s a Russian idiom. You can call her Ksusha after I’ve introduced you formerly. Until then, Johnson, don’t cross your eyes!”

Notecard Collection: Two

“The drive home got me thinking about you again. It was the sight of a dead armadillo on the side of the road that did it. Have you ever seen a dead armadillo? I haven’t. Until now I didn’t know they existed. But they do, I’ve seen it. It’s nothing like a live armadillo with its rigid conk-shell roof set evenly against the pull of gravity. The dead one carries this constant slight tilt, like a car with two flat tires on one side. We drove by fast, so I thought it wasn’t dead at all but just moving slowly in the opposite direction, like armadillos do. But it didn’t look up and Dad says it was dead. Didn’t I see the blood? That tilt has stayed with me in my mind, so now I think that gravity isn’t always equally distributed among the dead, that maybe it’s not given evenly to the living either, and it worries me that I’ve never considered this before. I thought you could answer this question because I’ve seen you favor your right leg sometimes for a few seconds after you stand up.”

Notecard Collection: One

She began this collection at age thirteen just after a visit to the Grand Canyon, the family’s first vacation and the principle reason for driving to Arizona. Her first note states that the canyon itself was not visible because of an unexpected snowstorm that filled the whole of what postcards purported to be the largest natural earthly depression in the northern hemisphere with clouds. Though unusually objective prose for a thirteen year old, rereading it just now reminds me that she was rather concerned at the time that the river at the bottom had also been concocted by novelists and imaginative amateur geologists, because she couldn’t see it for the clouds. These are my words, not hers. Hers were less to the point.

“Dear Virginia,” she wrote. “You’d believe this because it’s rare and unbelievable. We drove 750 miles to the Grand Canyon only to learn firsthand that both the adjective and its pretty noun have lost their credibility. Wouldn’t you know it, the whole of the Canyon was stuffed with down! Were I less of a Peter, or if you had been here to extend me your hand, I may have headed off across that big feather bed, found a soft spot in the middle somewhere, covered myself in a layer of snowflakes—because it may as well have been snowing as far as the beguiled weathermen were concerned—and taken a quick nap. But as it turned out, I was in shorts, a young and earnest believer in the words of my parents’ travel book, that the sun over Arizona is as diligent and determined as the Colorado River.”